The Quickstep

I'm still puzzling out whether it was a bug or some bad food ... wouldn't be surprised, as we had a workshop at the Hollywood Lodge out on the east edge of town early last week. Anyway, my intestines have been twisted in knots for three days and, well ... you know how that goes. Or maybe you don't. Diarrhoea (diarrhea to the Yanks) in Zambia is brilliant opportunity to explore the deepest depths of your soul. Whatever particular bug has infested my guts, it is the kind that causes the roughed-up joints and spots w. muscle tension to sing like they were packed with shredded glass. As such, the middle of my back, my right knee, both shoulders, and my neck took turns screaming at me. I alternated between laying on my bed, then on the floor when it got too hot, then sitting in a chair, repeating every few hours with bathroom breaks. 

If you haven't caught it by now, expat workers (particularly those of the RPCV variety) find solace in relating their bodily functions because frankly, the tropics and the developing world teach you the frailty of life in the face of about 6,000,000,000 ways to die. What was it in The Snows of Kilimanjaro ... the main character died for want of a bit of iodine.

The other thing dying fast around Mongu are the crops. We're now 15 days into our second dry spell of the year, and the maize is looking pretty far gone. It's not been a great year for the project ... Conservation Agriculture is climate-smart, but not climate-proof. Still, we missed some opportunities not being on time with planting due to our late start. Our extension workers are notorious for sitting still until they have seeds on hand, which given our late start date (late Oct. / mid-Nov. in some cases) we didn't get the seeds out until the later date. Then half of them planted straight in standing weeds, compromising the vital early growth of the plants, then weeding weeks later ... consequently, half of everything was spindly and easily attacked. 

Excuses, excuses. I just realize I will need to run like a demon this year when we take on 3,000 beneficiaries.

February 02, 2013

I've given up on snappy names for my blog posts, as my brain is relatively slow today ... in the office staring at a computer program (Great Plains) that my agency uses to manage our financial accounts. Long before I was the white in increasingly tarnished armor, I was a computer programmer with a bit of background in user interface (or UI, better known in the Android ~ app era as G[raphical]UI or "gooey"). Therefore, I feel somewhat entitled to pronounce that the UI / GUI for Great Plains software, known as FrXDrilldown, is a piece of excreta on the CAFO scale ... you can't get details behind budget lines without fishing into every single individual line. It reminds me of ice-fishing ... some guys simply drill holes in straight lines hoping to find the honey hole but mostly end up wasting time and making a lot of noise.

Oh well. It's work. Which is comme ce, comme ca this time of year. We have a great lot of new community-based field extension officers (FEWs) who need constant attention from our district extension officers (DEOs) who aren't able to provide said attention due to a) their lack of motorcycle licenses, b) their lack of motorcycles (most are currently stuck in Lusaka awaiting Interpol clearance thanks to HQ's decision to run an international tender); and c) nobody plays the bad guy during the site visits (more on that later).

The big issue is that we had early rains in October ... enough to get the grass growing; it then stayed fairly dry throughout November. Consequently, most of our FEWs dug their basins and planted into grass, opting to weed later. Much later ... half the maize and sorghum we saw on my field visits looks spindly due to it's growing up half-shaded. I scratch my head and grumble, look at the ground, and act (well, I am) really disappointed. I listen to the usual excuses, then quietly tell the FEW that if they want to continue being a FEW and receive a monthly allowance, they will never let me see another weed in their field again. Then I leave with the team wondering what the hell they do when they do make a visit w/o me. It's unfortunately unsurprising ... Zambians are notoriously non-confrontational to the point of never wanting to make anyone feel bad, so the fields go unweeded.

Oops! Drilldown has found an unbalanced line! Nope ... it crashed again. Later ...